This is the first post of what I'm calling a Lazy
River of Curious Content.
This is a way to review stuff that I've been doing, dealing with, or find
interesting during the week recently (This was
originally written two weeks ago, May 3rd, my shoddy internet connectivity kept
me from posting it.). I'm loosely following the format that Justin Sherrill
uses with great effect over at
https://dragonflydigest.com
Learn NixOS by turning a Raspberry Pi into a Wireless
Router Friend of the show, Anthony
Scopatz, tried NixOS for the first time and provides a detailed report:
"While I had read the NixOS pamphlets, and listened politely when the
faithful came knocking on my door at inconvenient times, I had never walked
the path of functional Linux enlightenment myself"
Reading through that made me file away a todo of writing up how I use
propellor (and why). But those todo
sometimes just pile up for a while...
An interview of one of my long time nerd-crushes, Rob
Pike. The questions focus on the Go
programming language, but read carefully, specifically the tone and considerate
nature of intent.
Owning up to still getting it wrong
sometimes. Over
on The Unix Historical Society list, there was a thread about the origin and
meaning of Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Venerable computing deity Ken Thompson sends a
private message to aforementioned computing demi-god Rob Pike, Rob forwards the
admonishment back to the list.
I started playing with Krita a few weeks ago, using a
tablet input device. I found out about Krita and felt empowered to try it thanks
to this excellent explanatory video tutorial by David
Revoy. Again,
recurring theme of humility and gentle nature of creative high-output
individuals. Thank you, David!
Fellow San Francisco Randonneurs cyclist Roy Ross passed away unexpectedly. A
gentle soul. This thread on
SFR gives a some
sense of a quiet
Deborah Ford put up some great photos of
Roy, and the Metin
Uz shared an album, with others pitching
in
I set up a mumble server and have been mumbling with some
old friends and family.
After Matthew and I chatted, I re-read his post about the
XFree / X.Org fork and open source
governance project
death, then went hoping around some links and came across
Rick Moen's fear of forking
essay, and he
followed up with this bit of Emacs / XEmacs
history
I showed Matthias and Camille my first tracing using Krita, and Matthias made me
aware of Grease Pencil - a way to do animations in Blender, and Camille sent me
an awesome and sweet comic book she made about their cat.
Matthias showed me that there's a way in Git now to have git blame ignore
stylistic commit changes - see ipython
PR#12091 for how to set it
up, and #12277 where we start
using it. This was a pet-peeve of mine back when Nelle started to apply
semi-automated PEP-8 formatting to parts of the matplotlib
codebase - that it was making it more difficult to use git blame to track down
when lines were changed functionally, and why.
And then, while we were chatting about a custom LaTeX completer PR that he has
open, he arrived at "wouldn't it be cool to throw and exception with the
table-flip emoji in your code?" ... and a short while later, he made that work:
You can also see it in it's original tweet
form and send Matthias some love. And by the way, Matthias has a new gig at
Quansight.
I've also tried out Mupen64Plus - a
Nintendo 64 emulator (which I found out about via OpenBSD ports list). I found
some ROMs that fell off the back of a truck, but without a proper controller,
it's kind of difficult to play (I tried with an SNES-like USB controller, no
dice). So now I've ordered a USB N64-like controller.